The other day, travelling from an unfamiliar part of town back home through heavy traffic, I decided to just let Google Maps call the shots. I could have navigated myself, just using major routes that went towards areas I knew, but I decided to see what Google Maps did for me.

The saying goes “even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day”. The implication is that no matter how wrong you are, how broken your reasoning, or how unfounded your opinion, once in a while (by chance) you’ll be right about something. There’s also an inverse corollary here: No matter how good your reasoning and your facts are, no matter how often you’re right, sometimes you’re going to make a mistake and be wrong.

Life’s tough like that, and we all really know these things, but it is largely these two principles that have led into a long-term distrust of the process of science.

“Left” and “Right” are two of the most commonly used political designations in this, or indeed in any, country. And you know, they actually used to mean something once. Back in revolutionary France, the “left” was opposed to the monarchy, and the “right” were supportive of its traditional structures.

In the years since then, “left” and “right” as political terms have come to mean a lot of different things. What they have come to mean in practical terms, however, is either a mark of the political naiveté of the speaker, or are used as terms of opprobrium. In actual practical political terms, they’re now effectively meaningless.

It’s occurred to me that some of you – perhaps even plenty of you – haven’t been following along in the particular social media outlets where discussions and explanations of my Web-sites’ extended downtime (three weeks), and the issues with the comments system were discussed.